Jamie Lee Williams

Jamie Lee Williams

Staff Attorney

Jamie Williams is a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she is part of EFF's civil liberties team. Jamie focuses on the First and Fourth Amendment implications of new technologies, and is part of EFF’s Coder’s Rights Project, which protects programmers and developers engaged in cutting-edge exploration of technology. Jamie joined EFF in 2014. Prior to joining EFF, Jamie clerked for Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong in the Northern District of California, and practiced at Paul Hastings LLP, as an associate in the firms’ litigation department. Jamie was also a law clerk at the Alameda County Public Defender. Jamie has a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and a B.A. in journalism from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Deeplinks Posts by Jamie Lee

One of the most frustrating things about law is how slowly it changes, leaving courts to apply old laws to facts that Congress never anticipated. That’s certainly the case with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the federal “anti-hacking” statute, which was passed back in 1986 and is...

All too often, new police surveillance tools are initially applied to only the “worst of the worst” and then slowly—but surely—expanded to include an ever-growing number of less culpable individuals. We’ve seen it with DNA collection. And now we’re starting to see it with GPS tracking. That’s why...

The United States Court of Appeal for the Seventh Circuit today struck down an overbroad permanent injunction against online speech issued by a lower court in a defamation case. The lower court had enjoined future speech that the jury had not specifically found to be defamatory, and the Seventh...

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion rejecting the government’s attempt to hold an employee criminally liable under the federal hacking statute—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)—for violating his employer-imposed computer use restrictions. The decision is important because it ensures that...

Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing hard on the notion that without a magical "backdoor" to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties to investigate crime and...

"Cyber-bullying" and other forms of online harassment are a serious problem. But as we have explained in the past, it is a challenge to craft laws or policies that address the harms caused by online harassment without unduly restricting speech or invading people’s privacy. New York tried and ...

UPDATE: On May 20, 2016, the Michigan Court of Appeals held that Twitter parodies are protected by the First Amendment, affirming the trial court’s decision to throw out Todd Levitt’s lawsuit against the creator of a parody Twitter account. The court held that “a reasonable reader, viewing the statements...

Today, the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued an opinion blocking the use of copyright to censor unwanted online criticism. The decision, Katz v. Chevaldina, is important because although copyright law is frequently misused as a tool to censor speech, it rarely makes it into court...

Yesterday, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. and law enforcement officials from Paris, London, and Madrid published an anti-encryption op-ed in the New York Times—an op-ed that amounts to nothing more than a blatant attempt to use fear mongering to further their anti-privacy, anti-security, and anti-constitutional agenda. They want...

After much public outcry, the treason investigation into German blog Netzpolitik.org was paused late last week. Yesterday, we were glad to hear that it had been officially dropped. This is a victory for the free press and the German public. The investigation, if permitted to continue, would...